Water closets, also called toilets, are waste disposal devices commonly installed in most bathrooms. These kinds of plumbing appliances generally include a water-storing receptacle called a water tank that is attached to a siphon seat-shaped bowl called toilet bowl. Periodically, waste is removed from the toilet bowl by flushing, thereby allowing water to drain from the water tank through the toilet bowl and into a waste drainpipe. In order to work, however, the toilet bowl must be connected to the waste drainpipe by fluid carrying conduits. Typically, the toilet bowl will sit flat on a floor and connect with a rigid water closet flange. The water closet flange in turn connects with conduits leading to a waste drainpipe.
Conventional water closet flanges are typically designed to interconnect between conduits lying on a common longitudinal axis. Accordingly, such water closet flanges are formed to be rigid and generally do not provide any kind of flexibility along their conduit portion and are therefore insufficient for allowing any non-negligible distortion of the flange. Such flexibility may be desirable in situations where the waste drain pipe has suffered deformation caused by stress or external forces applied by the materials surrounding the pipe (e.g. concrete, cement, etc.). These stresses may result in the opening of the pipe taking an oval shape, which in turn, would prevent prior art rigid flanges from entering the pipe, thus requiring the use of a wax seal applied directly to the pipe opening.
Moreover, flexible flanges may be desirable when connecting between discharge pipes and waste drain outlets having offset, misaligned, angled, or otherwise incongruous configurations. Use of rigid flanges in such situations would necessitate the use of wax seal applied directly to the pipe opening.
Still further, it has been found that dimensions of drainpipes often vary depending on the manufacturer. This situation is common in jurisdictions where such dimensions are not regulated and manufacturers minimize cost by manufacturing drainpipes to be thinner and/or smaller than needed.
As can be appreciated, the aforementioned problems are typically more prevalent in those jurisdictions lacking proper regulations, and having varying construction methods and materials. As explained above, because of the rigidity of the conduit portions of the closet flanges that are currently available, there are several problems related with oval shaped pipes, incongruous pipes and under or over sized pipes. Most professionals who deal with these kinds of problems turn to the use of wax seals and/or modification of the waste drainpipe. However, these solutions are not reliable because the seal connection is not strong enough to prevent leakage and associated odors, and oftentimes they can be expensive and inefficient due to delays in the installation process.
In most instances, plumbing code standards require leak tests to be conducted for all piping system installations. As a result, conventional water closet flanges are often designed with a rigid element for sealing the bore of the flange to allow leak tests to be conducted, which often involve applying hydrostatic or air pressure for a fixed amount of time and determining whether there is an unacceptable amount of pressure drop inside the pipeline. After leak tests have been completed, the applied pressure is relieved and the sealing element may then be removed. If the water closet is not immediately installed after the water closet flange is installed, the sealing element may be kept intact to prevent the sewage gases from being released into the atmosphere at the construction site. The sealing element is removed when the water closet is ready for installation. Rigid sealing elements, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), have been found to be difficult to remove and often inconveniently break into pieces and fall into the drainpipe during the removal process.
Improved water closet flanges for addressing the above-described problems are desired. Related methods for installing improved water closet flanges are also desired.